Any experience with the Visual Studio Shell?

Question

Our company is considering using the Visual Studio Shell for one of our products.

Does anyone have any experience using it? Was it easy to work with? Did it save time? Are there any things that you weren't able to get it to do? Have you shipped anything with it?

Answer 1

A couple of points regarding the Isolated shell.

As you might know, there are two considerations when you use shell - Isolated Mode and Integrated Mode. (Read more from MSDN)

Isolated Shell can be used by organizations, to build applications that run side by side with other editions of Visual Studio.

Here are some points we learned, trying to use shell for some of our applications.

• If you are planning to use Isolated shell, you can't use Microsoft Language Packages like C# and VB.NET inside that.
• Creating a package for your shell is much like creating any other VS Package.
• You don't have support for Team Explorer and VS Built in Source Control access, in Isolated Shell (See this post from Vin)

Though not directly related - If you are using VS SDK 1.1 to develop your packages - remember that the managed package framework is no longer available with the default distribution. So don't get surprised if your old packages can't load MPF files after moving to SDK 1.1. It has got moved to Codeplex as a separate download.

Answer 2

I played around a bit with it a couple of weeks ago, like every thing there is going to be a learn curve but if you study the examples a bit and have a look at a project on codeplex called Storyboard designer. I'm sure that you could pick it up, I found it very hard to find other examples on the net but I wasn't looking very hard.

I would say if you think that the shell can give you want you need I would go for it, it is a very handy interface to work with and if your targeting developers it is also a common interface for them, so it will feel natural.